School employs reverse racism to dumb everyone down

It is common knowledge that Americans perform poorly on science tests. Against peers in developed nations, Americans routinely underperform. America even issues thousands of science visas so that foreign graduates from China, India and elsewhere can come to the U.S. and fill needed chemistry and physics positions.

Faced with this disturbing set of facts, you would think officials would be doing everything possible to beef up science programs.

Not in socialist America.

The San Francisco Examiner reports that last month Berkeley High School approved a proposal that makes a mockery out of America’s education system.

The Berkeley High School Shared Governance Committee announced that it would be cutting the school’s science labs and five science teachers. Why? It wasn’t because the school had run out of money. Nor was it because of a lack of science students.

It was because of the lack of the right type of science students—as in right racial type.

Because it was deemed that the science classes mostly benefitted higher-achieving white and Asian students, resources would instead be diverted to help “struggling” black and Hispanic students, who mostly don’t take science anyway.

Berkeley officials highlighted an internal study that found an achievement gap between whites and Asians in comparison to blacks and Hispanics. Whites are scoring far better than state averages while black and Latino students are doing worse. According to the report:

This year Berkeley High was identified as the high school with the largest racial equity/achievement gap in the state. This is unconscionable. All students, regardless of ethnicity, deserve effective instruction with challenging and engaging curriculum. …All students deserve to learn the skills and content needed to be prepared for college. We need to know our students, to ensure that they have the information and support they need to find their way through Berkeley High and beyond.

Those may be noble-sounding words, but what do they really mean in practice?

They mean that instead of deciding to work toward helping all students achieve better grades and become better students, Berkeley will instead deprive all students of science laboratory experience in order to give additional benefits and money to a specific racial group of students who are doing poorly at their studies. This is racism— and socialism at its worst.

“The majority of the science department believes that this major policy decision affecting the entire student body, the faculty and the community has been made without any notification, without a hearing,” said Mardi Sicular-Mertens, the senior member of the school’s science department.

According to Sicular-Mertens, there are 12 African-American males in her AP classes, and her four environmental science classes have 17.5 percent African American and 13.9 percent Latino students. That compares to total school enrollment of 8 percent African American and 13 percent Latino students.

“As teachers, we are greatly saddened at the thought of losing the opportunity to help all of our students master the skills they need [for] success in their education,” says Sicular-Mertens.

There are several reasons for the difference in test scores between the races, including lack of discipline, broken family life, single parenting and alcoholism. The Examiner also blames the test score differential on gangsta rap and the crack-cocaine epidemic.

Regardless of the causes, eliminating the achievement gap by bringing down the achievers is not the answer. Discriminating against one group to give advantage to another is not the way to solve problems and goes against the very principles that the affirmative action movement supposedly stood for in the first place.

The good news is that there is a solution to America’s education woes. It is an educational system that is successfully employed by Herbert W. Armstrong College. You can read about it in the booklet Education With Vision.

Request a free enrollment in the Herbert W. Armstrong Bible Correspondence Course.